How to Grow in Chaotic Times

There’s a lot of chaos in our world today. It’s true in politics, it’s true in geopolitics, it’s true in technology, and it’s true in your business in your market. How do you increase your ability to keep up? How do you create a more agile business that can respond and actually use it as a competitive advantage? And I believe that the most important part of that is somewhat counterintuitive. So let me share what what I mean by that. There’s three steps that I recommend to do this.

Focus on the Finish Line
First is, are you totally clear, ironclad solid on where you’re going? And I don’t mean tomorrow. I don’t mean the part of your journey that will be affected by the latest news or the newest competitive announcement. I’m talking about the destination, which can be gotten to in many different paths that you can’t control.

But you can control your vision and your hope and your aspiration and driving of your business for the ultimate deliverable value you have to the market and your, and your clients. So I encourage you to take a look at that what I call true story. Why is it you’re here? What’s your business for and who is it for? And document that. Make sure everybody on the team is crystal clear on that ultimate destination.

Lighten the Load
Once you’ve done that, this is the non-intuitive part. Rather than piling things on or adding muscle to increase your agility, I recommend you do the opposite. Look for the parts of your business and your culture and your product, and even your customer base that are not conducive to you getting to that destination that you’ve said is, is is why you’re here and be picky, right?

Say no to activities, to priorities, to customers or prospects, anything or product options, anything that may be interesting or exciting or maybe comforting and question whether they are the right things for you to do. Because if you reduce the overhead, reduce the weight of your business, you’ll be more able to shift direction on a dime, right? And that I like to call from the cultural side, I like to call that zero culture. Remove the things that are in the way of you adapting to get to that destination that we’re talking about.

Goldfish Memory
And the final piece to this is have a goldfish memory. Have a culture that can shake off what happened last week and what happened yesterday, and refocus on the future given what it is, what the reality is today. The, the technology, um, roadmap for the industry may totally surprise you tomorrow. And things will come out of the woodwork that you hadn’t even thought of that now you have to deal with. The sooner you can let go of your grieving process about that and accept it as the new future, the quicker you will be able to adapt your plan and, um, guide your team to make the changes necessary to meet the moment and do what’s what’s in front of you.

B2B Clarity
Agility is gonna be a defining competitive advantage as change accelerates in our world and the companies that, uh, are good at that are gonna have more success than those that don’t, aren’t.